Contra monachismum

(For the Latin-impaired, the title means "Against monasticism.")

This post is lightly adapted from a long email I wrote Marie two years ago. If I worked at it I could make it better, I'm sure. But it belongs on this site and not just in my email, so let me put it there now and worry about polishing it another day.
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So. Why didn't I go to graduate school? Of course the short answer is that I did: Wife and I were both enrolled in graduate school from 1984-1986. But at the time we left I had no advanced degree, and I never went back. Why not?

 

Multiple reasons. Let's start with the most ... immediate, concrete, tangible, something like that. When we were there, Wife and I fought a lot. One of the recurring fights was that I spent "all my time" studying and "never" paid any attention to her. Of course I really did spend a lot of time studying; this is me we're talking about. And I probably didn't spend as much time with her as would have been good in a new marriage -- partly because I was studying, and partly because she often wasn't a lot of fun to be around. But I didn't see that so clearly at the time. I knew I was in pain over my marriage, but I had trouble identifying causes. So I bounced between thinking it was all her fault and thinking it was all mine. And the point is that when we left in 1986, I promised myself that I would never enroll in any school ever again so long as I was married to Wife. I had decided that, whatever other factors might or might not have been at work, I was "clearly" too obsessive a student to be allowed to carry on a romantic relationship if I were also studying for a degree.

 

That promise didn't stop me from thinking about going back. I fantasized about graduate school -- with or without Wife -- off and on for some years. Six, in fact -- right up until my former faculty advisor died in 1992. (That was an important year, in retrospect.) I had always imagined him as my lifeline back into Academia. I never really kept in touch with him, but we're talking about fantasy here. Anyway, that fantasy came to an abrupt end when he died and I really began to accept that what I was doing was not a digression from my real life, but actually WAS my real life.

 

From that time on, I pretty well abandoned the fantasy, except sometimes explicitly indulging it AS a fantasy. But it became more and more impractical. I had lost touch with all my contacts at school, and had abandoned my program with half my classes incomplete. For all I know, the I's may have turned into F's by now. Then in 1994 we bought a house and got a dog. In 1996 we had a baby, and in 1998 another. Pretty clearly at this point I was launched into whatever trajectory my life was going to have; it made no sense to think about starting over in another direction instead. Even when I lost my job at the end of 2002 and realized I'd have to do SOMETHING new, I never seriously entertained the idea of graduate school. A friend suggested I should teach classes at Adult Ed in some of the areas where I has acquired expertise, or maybe write a book. These ideas were flattering and I toyed with them briefly, but they weren't the same as going back into the heart of the Academy. After all, I needed a job and an income.

 

Those are the practical, "tangible" reasons. But of course there were others. Again, this is me we're talking about -- a born student. Right? One way or another, it's something I thought about a lot.

 

SO ALSO. Even while I was in graduate school, I felt like going there represented a failure of nerve. My dad once said that the reason he went to graduate school is that after he got his B.A. he found that the only thing he knew how to do was to go to school. So what the hell? He decided to keep going to school because it was easier than looking for a job. And I saw myself in the same boat. I'd had two years off between undergraduate school and graduate school -- what had I done with the time? Mostly nothing. Well, a few months of substitute teaching at the end, but nothing else. The accusation that maybe I didn't know how to do anything but go to school looked disturbingly plausible. And that made me want to do anything else instead. If all I knew was how to go to school, then damn it! I ought to be forced to do something else instead, just to learn another skill. If I were going to choose an academic life, I wanted it to be a real choice, a choice from strength, not a default that I simply fell into out of weakness and incapacity.

 

Besides, there was a corner of my brain which associated school with childhood. That's not crazy. Children go to school; adults Do Things Out in the World. So going to graduate school felt like choosing to perpetuate my childhood, perhaps indefinitely. But I was sick of being a child. I wanted -- finally! -- to be an adult. Which meant getting my ass the hell out of school and into the job market.

 

AND ALSO. You remember what I wrote you back in December? There was a part of me that hated my books, hated them passionately. Just like in the song, I felt like they were a wall cutting me off from other people. From real experiences. From the whole world. A wall that kept me locked in where it was drab, colorless, dusty, boring, and alone. What's more, I felt that this personal wall was just a smaller version of a much bigger wall which cut off the Academy from ... well you remember that back in college we referred to all of non-academic life collectively as the Real World. What were we saying about ourselves then? That's how I felt about it.

 

AND IN FACT. I felt there was something sterile and impotent about academic life. Clearly part of this feeling is that I associated academic life with my own life in books, and I associated my own bookishness with not having any sex. Equally clearly this chain of inference is provably false: plenty of professors have sex. Plenty of professors have children and raise families. To pursue an academic career does not require a vow of celibacy. But these are feelings, not thoughts. Facts have comparatively little relevance.

 

But there is a metaphorical sterility to the scholarly life as well. The whole point of scholarly research is to spend your life digging out new information that (for the most part) NOBODY WANTS TO KNOW. You work like hell to figure something out that nobody has ever understood before in the history of the world. You sweat over writing and rewriting it, until you say it just right. You fight like hell to get it published. And then nobody reads it. Ever. Nobody gives a shit. Ever. And you might as well make your living by digging a hole in the ground and then filling it in again.

 

Even you probably don't care that much. How many scholars do you suppose care deeply about the questions they are researching? Isn't it mostly that -- well hell, it looks interesting enough and they've got to be studying something? How many of  them will find their own lives transformed by anything they have learned? Isn't it mostly just a job? And if it is, aren't there easier jobs out there? Maybe even ones that pay better?

 

So a lot of research starts to look like masturbation: it might feel good at the time, but it doesn't generate anything new -- not new life, not even new (or deeper) love. Sterile.

 

BY COMPARISON. There's a strong overlap with how I feel about monasticism. This is something Debbie talked about from time to time: she wants to be a Buddhist nun. And the thought of it always bugged me. Why? Why wouldn't I want to be a monk? Well, there's the vow of celibacy to start with. There's also that you can't leave the monastery. You are as if locked in. Which makes monasticism sound a bit like prison. (Both prisoners and monks live in cells.) Now, the monastery we visited together hosts a lot of retreats. People go there for a weekend or a week. And if you live there as a monk or a nun, any relative of yours is welcome to come visit you for as long as they like. But you can't leave without permission of the abbot. It's a much nicer place than any prison I've ever heard of. But you can't leave. That's part of the deal.

 

ON THE OTHER HAND. You have to live somewhere. You can't live in two places at once. For somebody committed to the Buddha Dharma, wouldn't it be more pleasant to live somewhere that everybody else is as committed as you are? Isn't that actually the point? What sense does it make to complain that you can't leave?

 

MOREOVER. I have been on the campus of the local state university from time to time over the years, for lectures or movies or plays. I have been on retreat at the monastery, as I mentioned. The places in all the world where I feel most content and at home are university campuses and monastery grounds. There is something in the air in these places that feels like home in a way I have found nowhere else.

 

How can I so love the environment and still flee the life that produces it?

 

This is a great paradox for me, and I do not know how to read it.

What young women believe about their own sexuality

This is a companion piece to my rant of a few months ago against purity culture.

Only this time you don't have to listen to me. This time it's a TED talk by somebody who's done interviews and listened to the answers -- so maybe she knows what she's talking about? Just a thought.

Listen and weep ... or, better, listen and then try to make it better.

Dream this morning

I dreamt I was showering somewhere ... it wasn't a gym, but it was somewhere with several showers in the same place, like a gym or a barracks or so ... and I noticed that a couple of the people walking in to shower (naked, of course) were women. And what was interesting about the dream was how unremarkable it was. Nobody especially commented — I think in the dream I knew one of them and said "Hi" — and there was no sense either of embarrassment or of sexualization. That is, it did not signal to me inside the dream as particularly arousing, nor did anyone (men or women) make a point of turning away or hiding. It was just an unremarkable part of a larger story, and I was thinking about whatever it was in the story I was going to do next after washing ... only it so happened that that was when I woke up, so that's the bit I remembered. (And of course when I woke up I realized how unlikely an event it was and therefore remembered it longer.) But it was nice in a way not having the scene freighted with all the weight it would have in real life. Interesting.


Sent from my iPhone

What's an IYI?

I've talked before about how I am ill-at-ease with academic life, even though historically I was very, very good at it. (See here, for example.) There are multiple reasons, of course. One of them I wrote to Marie some time ago, but I seem never to have published here so I should go find it. (It compares academicism with monasticism as ways of life.)

But another part of it is that it always seems there's a risk of academics talking on and on about things they don't know. It's such an easy mode to slip into, it's not always clear that ignorance can stop you. And in my experience, it doesn't always.

This point has been made in multiple ways, over the years, by a wide range of people. Owen Ulph was always very good on the topic. (See my profile, or this obituary.)

But I recently ran across the writings of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and it is a running theme of his as well. So when I found the following passage available online -- with a statement giving blanket permission to reprint it under certain circumstances [scroll all the way to the bottom for a complete list] -- I could hardly resist.

This is an excerpt from Taleb's book, Skin in the Game.  

The Intellectual Yet Idiot

(Chapter in Skin in the game )

 

What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.

 

But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.

 

Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They can’t tell science from scientism — in fact in their image-oriented minds scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.

 

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The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI.

 

Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.

 

The IYI pathologizes others for doing things he doesn’t understand without ever realizing it is his understanding that may be limited. He thinks people should act according to their best interests and he knows their interests, particularly if they are “red necks” or English non-crisp-vowel class who voted for Brexit. When plebeians do something that makes sense to them, but not to him, the IYI uses the term “uneducated”. What we generally call participation in the political process, he calls by two distinct designations: “democracy” when it fits the IYI, and “populism” when the plebeians dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences. While rich people believe in one tax dollar one vote, more humanistic ones in one man one vote, Monsanto in one lobbyist one vote, the IYI believes in one Ivy League degree one-vote, with some equivalence for foreign elite schools and PhDs as these are needed in the club.

 

More socially, the IYI subscribes to The New Yorker. He never curses on twitter. He speaks of “equality of races” and “economic equality” but never went out drinking with a minority cab driver (again, no real skin in the game as the concept is foreign to the IYI). Those in the U.K. have been taken for a ride by Tony Blair. The modern IYI has attended more than one TEDx talks in person or watched more than two TED talks on Youtube. Not only did he vote for Hillary Monsanto-Malmaison because she seems electable and some such circular reasoning, but holds that anyone who doesn’t do so is mentally ill.

 

The IYI has a copy of the first hardback edition of The Black Swan on his shelves, but mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. He believes that GMOs are “science”, that the “technology” is not different from conventional breeding as a result of his readiness to confuse science with scientism.

 

Typically, the IYI get the first order logic right, but not second-order (or higher) effects making him totally incompetent in complex domains. In the comfort of his suburban home with 2-car garage, he advocated the “removal” of Gadhafi because he was “a dictator”, not realizing that removals have consequences (recall that he has no skin in the game and doesn’t pay for results).

 

The IYI has been wrong, historically, on Stalinism, Maoism, GMOs, Iraq, Libya, Syria, lobotomies, urban planning, low carbohydrate diets, gym machines, behaviorism, transfats, freudianism, portfolio theory, linear regression, Gaussianism, Salafism, dynamic stochastic equilibrium modeling, housing projects, selfish gene, election forecasting models, Bernie Madoff (pre-blowup) and p-values. But he is convinced that his current position is right.

 

The IYI is member of a club to get traveling privileges; if social scientist he uses statistics without knowing how they are derived (like Steven Pinker and psycholophasters in general); when in the UK, he goes to literary festivals; he drinks red wine with steak (never white); he used to believe that fat was harmful and has now completely reversed; he takes statins because his doctor told him to do so; he fails to understand ergodicity and when explained to him, he forgets about it soon later; he doesn’t use Yiddish words even when talking business; he studies grammar before speaking a language; he has a cousin who worked with someone who knows the Queen; he has never read Frederic Dard, Libanius Antiochus, Michael Oakeshot, John Gray, Amianus Marcellinus, Ibn Battuta, Saadiah Gaon, or Joseph De Maistre; he has never gotten drunk with Russians; he never drank to the point when one starts breaking glasses (or, preferably, chairs); he doesn’t even know the difference between Hecate and Hecuba (which in Brooklynese is “can’t tell sh**t from shinola”); he doesn’t know that there is no difference between “pseudointellectual” and “intellectual” in the absence of skin in the game; has mentioned quantum mechanics at least twice in the past five years in conversations that had nothing to do with physics.

 

He knows at any point in time what his words or actions are doing to his reputation.

 

But a much easier marker: he doesn’t even deadlift.

 

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The Blind and the Very Blind

Let’s suspend the satirical for a minute.

 

IYIs fail to distinguish between the letter and the spirit of things. They are so blinded by verbalistic notions such as science, education, democracy, racism, equality, evidence, rationality and similar buzzwords that they can be easily taken for a ride. They can thus cause monstrous iatrogenics without even feeling a shade of a guilt, because they are convinced that they mean well and that they can be thus justified to ignore the deep effect on reality. You would laugh at the doctor who nearly kills his patient yet argues about the effectiveness of his efforts because he lowered the latter’s cholesterol, missing that a metric that correlates to health is not quite health –it took a long time for medicine to convince its practitioners that health was what they needed to work on, not the exercise of what they thought was “science”, hence doing nothing was quite often preferable (via negativa). But yet, in a different domain, say foreign policy, a neo-con who doesn’t realize he has this mental defect would never feel any guilt for blowing up a country such as Libya, Iraq, or Syria, for the sake of “democracy”. I’ve tried to explain via negativa to a neocon: it was like trying to describe colors to someone born blind.

 

IYIs can be feel satisfied giving their money to a group aimed at “saving the children” who will spend most of it making powerpoint presentation and organizing conferences on how to save the children and completely miss the inconsistency.

 

Likewise an IYI routinely fails to make a distinction between an institution (say formal university setting and credentialization) and what its true aim is (knowledge, rigor in reasoning) –I’ve even seen a French academic arguing against a mathematician who had great (and useful) contributions because the former “didn’t go to a good school” when he was eighteen or so.

 

The propensity to this mental disability may be shared by all humans, and it has to be an ingrained defect, except that it disappears under skin in the game.

 

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Postscript

From the reactions to this piece, I discovered that the IYI has difficulty, when reading, in differentiating between the satirical and the literal.

PostPostcript

The IYI thinks this criticism of IYIs means “everybody is an idiot”, not realizing that their group represents, as we said, a tiny minority — but they don’t like their sense of entitlement to be challenged and although they treat the rest of humans as inferiors, they don’t like it when the waterhose is turned to the opposite direction (what the French call arroseur arrosé). (For instance, Richard Thaler, partner of the dangerous GMO advocate Übernudger Cass Sunstein, interpreted this piece as saying that “there are not many non-idiots not called Taleb”, not realizing that people like him are < 1% or even .1% of the population.)

Post-Post Postscript

(Written after the surprise election of 2016; the chapter above was written several months prior to the event). The election of Trump was so absurd to them and didn’t fit their worldview by such a large margin that they failed to find instructions in their textbook on how to react. It was exactly as on Candid Camera, imagine the characteristic look on someone’s face after they pull a trick on him, and the person is at a loss about how to react.

 

Or, more interestingly, imagine the looks and reaction of someone who thought he was happily married making an unscheduled return home and hears his wife squealing in bed with a (huge) doorman.

 

Pretty much everything forecasters, subforecasters, superforecasters, political “scientists”, psychologists, intellectuals, campaigners, “consultants”, big data scientists, everything they know was instantly shown to be a hoax. So my mischievous dream of putting a rat inside someone’s shirt (as expressed in The Black Swan) suddenly came true.

 

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Note: this piece can be reproduced, translated, and published by anyone under the condition that it is in its entirety and mentions that it is extracted from Skin in the Game.